A physicist there was, called by his king,
To listen for fearful weapons eerie ring,
Yet his efforts vanishd, into the sky,
Leaving him sadly to wonder why.
But his package was found, by caprice,
And a farmhand took it in, to the police.
The Kings best flyers were called in, and then,
The Major said This came Not from Men.
Now believers of aliens much ado make,
And museums honor a physicists mistake.

* First Read on Jan. 12, 2005, at the annual meeting of
the American Institute of Physics Teachers

Forget
aliens and a flying saucer. The Roswell Incident was a physics
experiment from Alamogordo that went awry, says the president of New
Mexicans for Science and Reason.

By
Dave Thomas, nmsrdaveATswcp.com(Help fight SPAM! Please replace the AT with
an @ )Special
to The Tribune

The
Roswell Daily Record started a legend: "RAAF (Roswell Army Air Field)
Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch In Roswell Region."
Roswell news and government officials
were bombarded by inquiries from all over the world. Had one of those
mysterious "flying disks" from outer space finally been
recovered?
According to many UFO authors, nothing
less than a spacecraft piloted by intelligent extraterrestrial beings
was the star of that show. Most popular depictions of aliens
attribute the little gray men with the large black eyes as hailing
from Roswell. It's everywhere you look -- "The X-Files" TV series,
the movie "Independence Day," Fox's Generation-X-traterrestrial teen
drama "Roswell," Showtime's "Roswell" movie and any number of
cable-TV documentaries.
The story usually goes like this: It
was a dark, stormy night in Roswell, around the Fourth of July
weekend of 1947. An alien spaceship crashed on a ranch near the
southeastern New Mexico town. A local rancher came across the wreck
and took some of the debris to the sheriff, who brought in the Army
Air Force in Roswell.
Maj. Jesse Marcel decided to accompany
the rancher back to the site. After collecting some curious-looking
debris with strange "alien" hieroglyphic markings, Marcel returned to
the base. The Army Air Force announced the recovery in a news
release.
Soon after, Marcel flew to Fort Worth,
Texas, to show the material to Gen. Roger Ramey. But Ramey brought
out a crummy old weather balloon and radar target for photographers,
and tales of the cosmic cover-up began.
That wing of the story holds that,
while the world placidly accepted the "flying saucer" as just a
weather balloon, the government whisked the real alien ship and
bodies (and, perhaps, even a living alien) to Wright Field in
Ohio.
By studying the aliens' technology
there, humans learned about lasers, integrated circuits and the like.
President Truman formed a top-secret science commission to handle all
matters alien, called "Majestic 12."
And now the aliens are living peaceably
underground in Area 51, helping the United States reverse-engineer
even more new gadgets. But the government has successfully and
ruthlessly suppressed any official release of any information
regarding these Earth-shaking events for more than five decades.
Or so the story goes.

What
really happened in Roswell

Something
fell from the sky and landed near Roswell in the summer of 1947. But
it didn't come from outer space. It came from . . . Alamogordo!
In fact, the legend of Roswell can be
traced directly to a series of top-secret physics experiments
designed to spy on Soviet nuclear tests.
The real story of the Roswell Incident
actually begins on Aug. 27, 1883, the day that the Indonesian volcano
Krakatoa blew its top with a blast literally heard around the world.
Time-of-flight analyses were performed on the volcanic rumbles for
several different cities, and it turned out that the sound waves must
have traveled in very cold air -- such as can be found 50,000 feet
up, between the troposphere (the lower atmosphere, where we live) and
the stratosphere (the upper atmosphere).
Indeed, that part of the sky acts as a
natural wave guide for very loud sounds, such as are produced by
volcanoes -- or by nuclear bombs.
In the days after World War II, U.S.
scientists were rightfully concerned about the Soviets getting The
Bomb. Desperate for a way to monitor possible Soviet bomb tests, the
scientists began Project Mogul, with the goal of using high-altitude
microphones to triangulate the positions of bomb tests. Mogul was the
secret name for the program, which involved getting the microphones
placed in the upper atmosphere for long periods of time.
That turned out to be very difficult.
At night, for example, it gets cold, and normal balloons drop like
stones.
And so it was that an unclassified part
of the program, "Constant-Level Balloons," was carried out by
graduate students from New York University. The first launches of the
elaborate microphone-carriers -- long trains of balloons, radar
reflectors and parachutes -- were done on the East Coast. They failed
miserably.
The project moved to Alamogordo.
Charles B. Moore, a New Mexico
Institute of Mining and Technology professor emeritus of physics, was
then one of those NYU graduate students. He has made public many of
his recollections of those days.
The NYU group's first launch from
Alamogordo, on June 4, 1947, was lost somewhere around Arabela, N.M.
"Chase crews" in those days didn't fly jaunty pickup trucks but flew
B-17s that followed the balloon trains, listening for data.
The complex, 600-foot-long assemblage
of Flight No. 4 included two dozen balloons, three radar reflectors,
some parachutes and black boxes. The reflectors were shaped like
jacks -- eight-sided structures made of balsa wood and tough, shiny,
metallic-coated paper. A toy company in Manhattan made them on the
side, and the company chose a curiously decorated tape to reinforce
the reflectors.
Moore launched hundreds of these
targets and marveled time and again at the unknown purpose of the
strange hieroglyphic-like markings on the reflectors.
Ten days after the June 4 launch,
rancher Mac Brazel came across a field strewn with remnants of
balloons and bits of metallic foil -- almost certainly the remains of
NYU Flight No. 4. Ten days after that, on June 24, pilot Kenneth
Arnold reported a sighting of strange flying objects that "skipped
like saucers."
This event plunged the nation into a
brief but intense "flying disk" craze, with frantic new reports of
sightings of the "disks" coming every day. There was even a total of
$3,000 offered for the recovery of a real disk. For weeks, the story
was every bit as intense as the modern-day media frenzies about
Monica or Elian.
(And has anyone noticed that switching
the "a" and "e" in "Elian" produces "Alien"? Just what is the
government not telling us?)
It was in this atmosphere, after the
Fourth of July weekend of 1947, that rancher Brazel decided to take
some of that strange material to the sheriff, who took it Maj.
Marcel. But Marcel's expertise was in making assessments of bomb
damage from aerial photographs. He had never seen a radar reflector;
the only time one like it had ever been used previously in New Mexico
was to measure winds aloft before the first atomic blast at Trinity
Site in 1945.
The unusual flexible metal paper, and
especially the strange hieroglyphic-like symbols, probably combined
with the national "Flying Disk" frenzy to convince Marcel that this
was, indeed, a real "flying disk."
And so it was announced by the Roswell
Army Air Force Intelligence Office (Marcel's group) in a press
release on July 8, 1947.
When Gen. Ramey heard of this turn of
events, he called for the materials and Marcel to be flown out to
Fort Worth that very afternoon.
This was done, and Ramey called down
his weather officer to look at the debris. This man, Irving Newton,
was excited to see a real "flying disk" for himself. That is, until
he walked in to the room to see what he promptly told Ramey was
simply a radar target and some old weather balloons.
The general held a press conference
shortly afterward, and Roswell's 15 minutes of fame were over. At
least, they were over for three decades.

Then
the story gets better

In
the late 1970s, the Roswell legend emerged as the best-accepted UFO
case of them all.
Marcel was interviewed and declared
that the materials were "not of this Earth." Stories of government
harassment and strange materials began to surface; the legend
grew.
Ten years after that, after Marcel and
Brazel had died, the stories began to include the mention of alien
bodies and autopsies and such.
The ¹90s became the Decade of
Roswell, and the incident has assumed UFOdom's "best case"
mantle.
The city of Roswell is doing very well
at generating income from the annual Roswell UFO celebrations, one of
which wraps up this weekend. That's not a bad thing -- some towns
have potato festivals; others have alien festivals.
It is ironic, though, that all the fuss
is about a lost physics experiment.
Project Mogul was never successful in
its primary goal, and other methods were eventually adopted to track
Soviet nuclear activity. The Air Force didn't even put Mogul flights
together with tales of the Roswell Incident. That connection was
first realized by UFO researcher Robert Todd and was independently
discovered by Placitas writer Karl Pflock. Todd contacted Charles
Moore, who told the Air Force about it, and subsequent research
clinched the connection.
But many people have never heard the
rational explanation for Roswell. You probably wouldn't know it from
watching television, because the Mogul explanation is only mentioned
rarely and then usually in a casual dismissal.
The sound bites that UFO promoters
throw out in their encouragement of belief in alien visitation have
all been answered but to no avail. I heard one UFO proponent exclaim
that "those scientists wouldn't know a UFO if it landed on their
head!"
That sounds nice, but it's really a
clever bit of spin that covers up the fact that, in more than 50
years of blurry photographs and conflicting stories, not one UFO has
ever landed on a scientist's head. Not one clearly alien tool or
tissue sample has ever been provided for study. Not one. There have
been candidates, to be sure, but these have invariably turned out to
be hoaxes or of undocumented origin (as we'll soon see).
Another commonly voiced objection to
the Mogul explanation concerns Marcel's expertise. How could a major
in the only nuclear-capable wing of the Air Force mistake a silly
weather balloon for a spaceship? The fact of the matter is that
Marcel never said it was a "spaceship." In a 1979 interview, he did
say: "I believe it was nothing that came from Earth. It came to Earth
but not from Earth."
That sound bite figures prominently in
UFO documentaries and books. Too bad they don't tell you the rest of
the story, such as Marcel's response to reporter Bob Pratt's query:
"This was obviously no rocket?" Marcel answered: "Oh, no. Unh unh.
I've seen rockets sent up at the White Sands testing grounds. It
definitely was not part of an aircraft, nor a missile or a
rocket."
Similarly, rancher Brazel is quoted in
the July 9, 1947, Roswell paper as saying "I am sure what I found was
not any weather balloon." But only rarely do you get to hear other
comments Brazel made in that same interview, describing the debris as
rubber strips, tinfoil, tough paper, tape with flowers printed on it,
and sticks, maybe weighing 5 pounds altogether.
Almost all Roswell believers claim that
the famous pictures of Marcel, Ramey and Newton with the "UFO debris"
show only the radar targets and material brought in as a cover-up,
while the real UFO material was whisked away. But there's a problem
with that scenario, as well.
Irving Newton, Ramey's weather officer,
said: "While I was examining the debris, Major Marcel was picking up
pieces of the target sticks and trying to convince me that some
notations on the sticks were alien writing. There were figures on the
sticks lavender or pink in color, that appeared to be weather-faded
markings with no rhyme or reason. He did not convince me these were
alien writings. . . . I was convinced at the time that this was a
RAWIN target and remain convinced."
The problem is this: If the target was
brought in as a cover-up, which Marcel would certainly realize, then
why would the poor major, humiliated by having to have his picture
taken with the fake target, try to convince Newton that the cover-up
"debris" seemed to have alien hieroglyphics?

The
trouble with little gray men

Roswell
has generated little in the way of solid evidence but has been
indirectly responsible for a long string of hoaxes and forgeries.
A supposed fragment of the Roswell
spaceship surfaced in 1996. The fragment was tested at New Mexico
Tech and at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and was found to be
copper and silver in normal (terrestrial) isotopic abundances. Then
it turned out that the "fragment" was just a piece of scrap from the
work of Utah artist Randy Fullbright.
Fullbright used a Japanese technique of
layering copper and silver, producing a strange-looking layered
metal. Someone snatched a piece of the scrap and gave it to an
innocent man about to move to Roswell, telling him that it actually
came from the Roswell ship and to take it to the UFO museum
there.
A second "fragment" emerged at the 1997
Roswell festival, but this one failed some basic science
requirements. The Internet report on the analysis of this fragment
included measurements of materials so radioactive they wouldn't last
a week, much less 50 years. This episode ended with the general
realization that it is indeed possible to whip up alien-looking
alloys in the lab, given access to pure isotopes.
In addition, there is the case of the
MJ-12 (Majestic 12) papers, purportedly describing the top-secret
alien analyses of a dozen top scientists appointed by Truman. But
Phillip Klass, the Washington, D.C., publisher of Skeptics UFO
Newsletter, has showed that Truman's signature on a key MJ-12
document had been photocopied from a non-UFO-related Truman
letter.
A host of other problems plague the
MJ-12 documents, but that doesn't stop new ones from coming out.
Then there's the sad tale of Penthouse
magazine, which paid a huge sum for a photograph of the Roswell
"alien" for its September 1996 issue. The image turned out to be a
fuzzy photograph of the plastic alien prop in the UFO Museum in
Roswell.
Perhaps the biggest Roswell hoax of all
is the "Alien Autopsy" film, which Fox-TV producers aired twice
before debunking the film themselves in a third special.
Why does it matter? What could it hurt?
Is belief in aliens harmful?
I have no problem with speculation
about life beyond our tiny planet or with generating needed income
with a twist on the traditional small-town festival.
As a boy, I idolized Capt. Kirk and Mr.
Spock, and watched every bug-eyed alien on the "Outer Limits."
Nowadays, I help with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by
letting my computer run the Setihome screen saver.
The problem, however, arises when the
line between curious speculation and unsupported belief is crossed.
The Heaven's Gate cult seized on a typical Internet story, this one
about a "mothership" companion to the Hale-Bopp comet and believed
it, even after telescopes the group bought refused to reveal the
mothership. (They returned the telescopes as defective.)
Unsupported belief can be deadly if it
makes you do dangerous things, such as the Heaven's Gate suicides
made in hopes of joining the mothership, or avoid doing safe things,
like shunning mainstream treatment for cancer in favor of shark
cartilage. (Shark cartilage has not been shown to reduce cancer, and
a recent report confirmed that sharks do get cancer, contrary to the
popular belief they don't.)
Roswell can be a lot of fun. So have
fun. But don't believe everything you hear about it!

Quotes Worth Repeating!
by Dave
Thomas

Quote #1 : You've probably heard UFO
promoters say things like
"How could an
Army major not be able to tell the difference between a weather
balloon and a spaceship?"
Indeed, here's a quote from a 1979 interview that UFO authors
sometimes cite to show Marcel thought the debris was alien
(extraterrestrial):
"I
believe it was nothing that came from earth. It came to earth, but
not from earth."

But here's another comment Marcel made
during that same interview that tells a DIFFERENT story! Asked
by National Enquirer reporter Bob Pratt
"This was
obviously no rocket?" Marcel
responded "Oh
no. Unh unh. Ive see rockets sent up at the White Sands testing
grounds. It definitely was not part of an aircraft, nor a missile or
a rocket."

Quote #2 : Was the Debris
Switched? Most Roswell believers claim the
"debris" appearing in the famous Ft. Worth Star-Telegram
photographs by J. Bond Johnson is just a crummy weather balloon,
which the Army switched to cover up the "real" debris
(presumably flown to Wright Field). But consider this quote from Gen.
Rameys weather officer, Irving Newton:

While
I was examining the debris, Major Marcel was picking up pieces of the
target sticks and trying to convince me that some notations on the
sticks were alien writing. There were figures on the sticks lavender
or pink in color, appeared to be weather faded markings with no rhyme
or reason. He did not convince me these were alien writings I
was convinced at the time that this was a Rawin target and remain
convinced.

OK, can someone explain to me why Marcel,
who would have been humiliated at having to be photographed with the
crummy weather-balloon cover-up material (as seen in the Showtime
movie "Roswell"), spent a good bit of time trying to convince the
person who identified the debris as weather equipment that the crummy
cover-up "debris" ALSO had alien symbols, just like the
"real" debris? Someone? Anyone?

The Truth About
Ro$wellOriginal Cartoon copyright 1997-2003 David E. Thomas